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EDITOR'S CHOICE: Tony Delamothe A good QOFfing whine BMJ 2008; 337: a2632 [Full text]

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No marriage without dowry!

BM Hegde   (23 November 2008)

No marriage without dowry! 23 November 2008
BM Hegde, Editor in Chief, Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes Mangalore-575 004. India Send response to journal: Re: No marriage without dowry!	Dear Dr. Delamothe, I liked the conference message from New York in this issue and your editorial. For decades now I have been trying to din into the heads of the powers that be in the medical world that health has very little to do with hospitals, doctors and their interventions. In the global context health is only about supplying the basic needs of the large majority with clean drinking water, three meals a day uncontaminated with human and/or animal excreta, a roof on the top in place of the star lit sky at night, proper sanitation to avoid hookworm and other associated dangers, literacy to enable people to gain access to information on healthy habits, compulsory schooling for all children, especially the females of the species, getting people’s compliance with family welfare measures that are people friendly, avoiding cooking smoke coming into the house, and economic empowerment of poor women. These, added to freeing the masses from suppression, oppression and denial in the name of governance, religion etc will usher in a healthy society. Do we doctors have any role in all these? Are we just trained to be robots to intervene only when one is ill? Don’t we have an obligation to try and keep the “well” healthy? Should not trainee doctors be taught about their social consciousness and their social conscience? Public health is looking after the health of the public and doctors’ primary role should be in that area. Unfortunately, all the above basic needs of good health are outside the control of doctors! No conference seems to address this basic fundamental question. Such a conference will have to include physicians, social leaders, politicians and leaders to bring in this basic change in society’s thinking. Is it because there is no dowry in keeping the well healthy while intervening in disease could be very lucrative that we ignore that vital area of health? There are more questions than answers in that area. Yours ever, bmhegde Competing interests: None declared